Your two most important tools is a spoon and pot.
When the sky dragon begins to devour the sun and eat up the light, you have to bang the spoon on the bottom of the pot while hopping from one foot to another and chanting “No, no we don’t want you here! Sky Dragon go away! Hey ho go away!”
Repeat until the sky dragon is driven away! The chant is guaranteed, in over three thousand years it has worked, the sun always fought off the evil sky dragon.
Though out history eclipses foretold disasters, they were blamed for earthquakes, the murder of kings, floods, and famine.
When the dragon ate the sun: how ancient peoples interpreted solar eclipses
VOX
By Constance Grady
August 21, 2017The English word eclipse comes from the Greek ἔκλειψις, ekleípō: disappearance, abandonment. A solar eclipse is the moment in which the sun disappears, abandoning the world. It’s like being forsaken by a god.
The ancient Greeks thought of a solar eclipse as an act of abandonment, a terrible crisis and an existential threat. It meant that the king would fall, that terrible misfortunes would rain down on the world, or that demons had swallowed the sun.
Yet not everyone thought of the eclipse as a horrible threat. For some cultures, the eclipse was an act of creation: The sun and moon were coupling, and would create more stars. For others, it was a random and chaotic act by a trickster or a mischievous boy, causing trouble just for the sake of it.
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In many cultures, the darkening of the sun meant the gods were very, very angry with humanity, and about to inflict some punishment. Often, that meant that in order to appease them, you had to kill someone.
In ancient Egypt, Apep, the serpent of chaos and death, opposed Ra, the sun god, and was always trying to reach Ra’s skyboat to devour the sundisc — but in the end, Ra was always able to fight him off, and the sun would come back.
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In Norse mythology, the sky wolves Hati and Skoll chase the sun and the moon endlessly, waiting for Ragnarok, when they can finally swallow their prey and plunge the earth into darkness, heralding the final destruction of the Viking gods. It’s not entirely clear whether the Vikings thought of eclipses as near misses at Ragnarok, with Hati and Skoll nearly capturing their prey, but many scholars believe there’s a pretty strong possibility that they did.
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For ancient Persia, eclipses happened if the trickster pari decided to blot out the sun for fun. In the legends of multiple Native American tribes — the Cree, the Choctaw, and the Menomini — an eclipse happens because a little boy has trapped the sun in a net, usually to get revenge on the sun for burning him. The boy refuses to release the sun, and an animal has to chew the net open.
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For the Inuits, the sun and moon weren’t a married couple but brother and sister. At the beginning of the world they quarreled, and the sun goddess Malina walked away from her brother, the moon god Anningan. Anningan continued to chase after her, and whenever he caught up to her, there was an eclipse.
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The Kalina of Suriname also thought of the moon as brother and sister, but their version of the relationship between the two heavenly bodies was a little more violent. An eclipse meant one of them had knocked the other one out.
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